Journal Journal: Howdy Slashdotters, This is my intro to you!
For the record I am 45 years old, I currently work as a Chief Communications Technician for NASA's communications division under a contract let most recently to Honeywell. I've been doing comm's support and electronics for NASA through whatever contractor owns my contract for 13 years now, before that I worked in a field service job in the banking automation industry, helping to bring America's Banking Industry into the Computer Age, and before that I worked for the USAF in a variety of technical jobs doing this and that. I've been an electronics expert since my dad started teaching me how to test and repair TV's and Radios back in the Vacuum tube era. I was all of seven at the time.
My first experience with computers came in high school where they where enlightened enough to have a Data processing course. I learned on IBM 029 and 129 Keypunches, an old IBM accounting machine (think glorified printer with the brains of an ant, no scratch that, an ant is infinitely smarter) and sending batch filed punch card programs to our counties data center for running with a two day turn around. My first true programming language was RPG and I can remember when I was so excited to hear that they had built a 64K memory card for an S100 buss computer and the Altair was the new, new thing. In the military my friends bought TRS-80's and Apples and I was the proud owner of a Timex/Sinclair ZX-81. I learned BASIC and peeks and pokes and had grand fun. As the industry continues I graduated to Zenith computers at work and wrote programs to interface them to AT&T telephone switches instead of the dumb TTY terminals that they were supposed to work with. I helped start one of the first military computer-user groups (don't know what happened to it after I left the service). Got out and moved to Boston and joined the Worlds BEST and BIGGEST computer User group The Boston Computer Society (sadly gone now. I really miss those folks) Moved onto an IBM PJ Junior, then a 286 clone from Olivetti, and nowadays my PC of choice is an AMD Opteron running on a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe board that I built myself (The PC, not the motherboard or chip obviously.)
Somewhere along the way I managed to acquire a wife, two kids, a spoiled cat, a mortgage, two used cars and the regular trimmings of middle class existence. I'm Republican and Catholic, rabidly conservative (in a congenial sort of way), and cherish the ambition of becoming the neighborhood old coot in a few years. I enjoy science, science fiction, politics, a good Riesling, RPG'ing, and toodling around on my computer.
OH and chocolate and coffee, I must have my chocolate and coffee!
SO now you know who I am and where I'm coming from. It's probably as good a dossier as the FBI has on me. I hope you enjoyed it. If you were also in the BCS feel free to write (my old Resource Center buddies especially, or any of the office folks, really.) (Congrats Margaret M on the job!) If you were one of my D&D buddies at McChord PLEASE WRITE!!! (That means you T.A., or you Bruce, or you Rich Denell. (Or Tom or Ed) I have Jim and Kelly's email addresses. I'd love to get a game together someday, for old time's sake if nothing else.)
And if you're ever my way feel free to stop in. Bring a hammer and nails, I almost always have something needing work and damned if I feel like doing it! Cheers!!!!
